A lot of people nowadays, you know, have views on software that it should all be free and
nobody should ever make a dime off of writing a software product, you know. And then again,
there's people who say, well, if they can't make any money, then how are they going to feed their
family? So it's a, I guess I got started, you know, when there wasn't much help from the vendors,
you know, IBM and Microsoft where they quote only vendors and then Compaq came in a little
later, you know, with a computer, you know, the old sewing machine type thing, the $4,000 worth of
a PC with a floppy drive in it, a little green screen. But, you know, one of the things that I
found out from talking with the FidoNet people was that there was compatibility and complete
lack of compatibility between the IBM clones. So for instance, the Deck Rainbow specifically
didn't want to do certain things the same way as IBM, partially for patent reasons, but partially
because they didn't want IBM to own the standard. And that it turned out that even though on the
outset, you know, on the outside it was like, oh, this is, you know, oh, here, this one does DOS,
this one does DOS. It turned out that... DOS is not DOS is not DOS, yes. Yeah, they, I still,
in fact, a good friend of mine, Jerry Schneider, who was involved with starting the Umbrella
Organization for User Groups in the, I guess it was in the late 80s, early 90s, something like
that. And he had, right now he has lupus and so therefore he can't get involved with anything
with stress, you know. But he was doing some work for a museum, I think was, I believe the guy with
Jonathan something in Boston Computer Society, he had a computer museum. Well, evidently the
Boston Computer Society was kind of like an umbrella organization of smaller user groups,
or SIGs as they call them, you know. And in that, in that venture, he was doing some work for some
company or some organization for a computer museum. And I gave him an IBM PC version one,
with a single-sided floppy disk that cost $450, you know. And I, in fact, I still have one of the,
you know, I bought one of those IBM C portables at the time, you know, the IBM portables, the big
terrible looking things, you know, with the little green monitor fit on top of it, the CGA. And I
still have it, in fact. But I have a, like I have a Model 100 Radio Shack, the little laptop, you
know, wrote and compiled or interpreted BASIC. And he had to write things. The BASIC in it was
different than the BASIC in GWBASIC. Because I still use GWBASIC today. And I run, I have,
downstairs I have a server, 2003, Windows 2003 server, and GWBASIC from 1983, I guess it is,
still works on it. In fact, I have it on my portable in the kitchen, GWBASIC, and write
BASIC programs, you know, for I equal one to ten type things. And I still do a lot of stuff. And I
have the BASIC compiler still, the GWBASIC compiler from Microsoft installed on my server. And every
now and then I'll go and compile a little BASIC program so that I can get longer strings and that
sort of stuff. But the, that, that, that breed of computers gets kind of like post renamed to
luggables once the real portables start coming out. Yeah, yeah. Well, the things this, you got to
remember, like the Compaq was really the first portable, you know, and it was as big as one of
these portable sewing machines you carry around, you know. In fact, the biggest problem with that
Compaq was you'd see people lugging them through the airport and all of a sudden their, their,
their keyboard would be laying, dragging along behind them because there, there was two little
laps on their keyboard. Class like that, that you had to push out to lock the keyboard onto this,
that covered the screen and the floppy drives. And that would get jarred and come loose in a
minute, you know. There was no firm way. I've seen people go down with and end up with a, with a
luggage strap around through the handle and over the keyboard to keep it on the end of it. Now,
with, by the way, I actually tracked down a BBS program for the Model 100 that somebody wrote in
BASIC. It can store 16 messages if you don't have an expanded one. Is that right? That's what you
need. Because I guess it had an expansion. You know, one of the things that's really hard to,
I'm always trying to get the stuff that, like, people say, like, pundits and journalists will
tend to say things like, you know, oh, back then it cost a lot of money for, you know, cost a lot
of money for what now we wouldn't consider very much of a computer. But beyond that, there's
actual other stuff like that, like the fact that there's, like, the concept of the luggable, that
they wanted portables, but the best they could do at the time was to have something kind of huge
and unwieldy. And just the experience of trying to, you know, get programs to run on different
machines, just, you know, a lot of that, that's the stuff that I'm always interested in people
knowing about. Because it's, because, you know, that's the kind of lost stuff that goes, you know,
as soon as people figured out, you know, once in another 10 years, nobody will know a world without
anti-lock brakes, you know, like, that's not a, they'll say, what do you mean? I don't understand
what you're talking about. You know, when you stop, you stop in water, who cares? And people just
won't have that knowledge of how to stop otherwise. People don't know, people don't know what a turn
signals were before they had cars without turn signals, you know? And, I mean, the only people,
you have to pay a premium nowadays to have a car with a stick shift, you know? You know, and a lot
of people, if you put them in a car with a clutch, they wouldn't be able to drive. They have no idea
in the world what to do, the relationship between the clutch and the shift, you know? Right. And so
what you have in these cases with computers is that now, with things like Windows, the toughest
thing you have to deal with in many cases is, you know, which set of boxes you should be clicking
and unclicking within it, as opposed to, maybe I have to open it up again to go down and get the
right dip switch going or get this going. And that's kind of, you know, that's the kind of lost
knowledge that I'm always looking for, even just on the outside with BBSs. You know, like you
mentioned, you became, or you were involved with the Capital PC users group. I mean, what attracted
you to the IBM PC versus any other computer? Well, I'll tell you what, when I first started out, I
got a letter in the mail from a company wanting me to do some research. I don't know why, but they
wanted me to do some research on visiting different computer stores. At that time, there wasn't very
many computers. There was the Apple, I believe it was, I mean, I believe it was, I know it was, and
the Osborne, and the IBM at the time was going to come up with a computer. This was in pre-1981,
say about July, August, September timeframe of 1981. And the routine was, they wanted me to go
to these places and ask some questions, you know. So there was a store over on, off a Rockville bike
in the back, and they sold Osborne's. And I went in there to look at one, and it looked like a big
compact, except it was a little tiny green, orange screen, about yay big, and a floppy drive. And it
ran, and Adam Osborne, of course, was, you know, one of our pioneers, of course. But he made the stupid
mistake of saying, oh, you can buy this one now, but I'm going to have a better one next year, you
know. I'm sure that everybody says, well, why should I buy this one if I'm going to, there's going to be a
next one next year. If they'll give me a 50% discount, I might do it. But at the same time as this, I
went to look at that. And then about that time is when I went down to, and the only place you could
buy a computer, an IBM, was the IBM product store down in downtown Washington, D.C. on 18th and K,
I think it was. So I went down there, and I looked at it. You know, I knew that I liked computers,
because I had been in the Navy, and I worked at the, I was stationed down in Crystal City at the
Navy Department, and we used, we used an IBM mainframe, and we used a little program called
Wilbur, but there's a terminal dial in with an acoustic coupler, and dial into it, and you were
able to create small programs, and also enter data, and then be able to sort that data and print it
out in different formats. And so I developed this option of putting all this data in there, then I'd
put blank lines in there, and then I would put a page eject in there, and then I would print it out
on a local printer, and effectively I had a report that I had to literally hand generate myself. This
was back in the, let's see, I'm trying to think of time frame, you know, in the mid-70s, in fact,
early 70s is when I really started in computers with IBM mainframe and Wilbur, and then I believe
it was about 75, 77, 76 time frame. I went to work for Vitro Corporation, which is right over here,
it's all gone now, of course, Home Depot is there, and then I got involved over there in their,
using their computer to take care of some work I had to do with keeping track of people throughout
the, and equipment throughout the United States and the world for the Navy Department. I was,
I was retired from the service in 1975, then I went to work for Vitro after about a year,
and they took and had me take care of inventory of Navy radar systems, antennas, and radars,
and people throughout the, throughout the world. And so I used the NIH computer mostly, and when I
was in the, when I was in the Navy, then when I got out, I went to work for Vitro, I used Vitro's
computer and did the same thing effectively. And so then in the 80s, 81, I think it was, I keep
thinking it was about November of 81 when they introduced the IBM PC-1, or PC period, you know,
that I went to the product store and I thought this is neat, you know, because I was, when I
was working with mainframes, I liked the idea of being able to do things, but then I, I thought
this would be neat to be able to do everything on my home computer and not have to, to dial up a
telephone line to go someplace else. And so I, you know, $5,000 was a lot of money in that
time frame. So anyway, I said to heck with it, I wanted to do it. And so I, I bought an IBM PC-1
with, and I got two floppy drives and I got the video adapter that used a TV interface module to
be able to put on TV. And I realized that, you know, 40 com wide just wasn't going to do it for me.
So I went down and I bought the monochrome adapter and a monochrome monitor, which costs another
about $800 by the time you bought the adapter and the monitor, because a real good text on a,
on a monochrome monitor. And so I used that for a while and I, then I got at that time, same time,
I says, well, I'd like to be able to call other people. There wasn't any options for, you know,
uh, getting fixes for anything or getting things, you know, other people, you know,
be able to transfer files between other people and that sort of stuff. So I bought a asynchronous
card and I, of course I, with that and a Hayes 300 BPS modem, which I think the modem costs
on like $450 or $500 for that at that time. But I said, you know, I was working and I
doing fine. I said, heck with it. I would do it. And, uh, so I bought this modem asynchronous card
and, uh, I was able to dial in to, uh, the company's mainframe and be able to
effectively term, uh, termination. And then, uh, I think it was in the early
January, February time for me to, when, uh, the computer land over on Rockville Pike,
had a notice there that said they were forming a PC user group in their lobby,
you know, at 7 31 night, you know, about seven or eight of us met, you know, and then we met over in
Virginia and, uh, Todd, Mike Todd was the, uh, one of the formers of the thing and West merchant
and West merchant. Did you ever see what, did you ever talk to West merchant? West merchant ran
a bulletin board on a TRS 80, you know, uh, and so it became the capital PC user group, uh, bulletin
board system, you know, and it was messages. Primarily it was using the TRS, uh, uh, software
of some kind or leaving messages for everybody. And you can make general messages and private
messages and, and, uh, that sort of thing. He didn't have the capability to transfer files, except in,
in a, uh, a message, you know, you could write a little basic program to do things
because in the IBM world, uh, part of the basic interpreter was in ROM. Uh, you couldn't run it
on another machine, uh, in many cases because it depended upon certain things being in ROM
and whether it was advanced basic or plain basic, advanced basic, uh, plain basic wouldn't do
certain things that advanced basic would. And then of course, uh, we took him and, uh, we formed up
this capital PC user group and I think it was about March, April, May timeframe. Maybe it was,
maybe as late as June of 1982 is when I says, well, we took the IBM asynchronous communication
program, which was their, their communication program at that time. Uh, PC talk wasn't even
out yet. I don't think in that timeframe and we used it and we said, well, you know, if we can
call somebody with it, uh, and like we called, uh, West merchants bulletin board system with it,
you know, it, it was one of, it was a real convoluted basic, uh, interpreted basic program to
do it. And it called a couple of machine language routines in there, which IBM did primarily to
keep people from, uh, modifying the program. So you'd be real careful when you modified anything
is if you didn't, that call routine in there, uh, would call things and it was only, uh,
could only be run on, uh, IBM computer with this part of the basic in ROM.
So in a way, I think it was, uh, PC talk. So anyway, I decided I would, uh, write something
and I think the first, I, I honestly don't remember the first software I wrote, but I think it was Don
Withrow who wrote host com and, uh, between him and the, uh, the other people started running this
program that would answer the very simple program that would answer the telephone and ask people
their name and password and check it and that sort of stuff and have some basic programs. But of
course there was no binary file transfer capability because everything was, uh, you know, it was an
ASCII effectively. So if you were retrieving something, uh, from someone's bulletin board and
you've got shut off in the middle, you were just out of luck. So anyway, you got it in ASCII and
then you had to, uh, to take and, and, uh, uh, bring it in and save it in ASCII on your hard disk
and then bring it into the basic interpreter and then you can make changes to it. And the 300 BPS
was, uh, uh, you know, pretty slow. And if you had much to do, so then I started writing, uh,
Don With wrote this program called host com, which was a, uh, come out about the same time
that RBBS PC came out that, uh, I don't know whether it was Tom Mack. There were some other
people involved in the first, but in a way we grabbed it. Uh, Tom Mack then grabbed it and
started taking and, and improving it and making modifications and giving out the source code to
everybody. And, and, uh, we wanted to write some, the capability to be able to transmit
compiled or binary programs around. And so, uh, I wrote a little program that, uh, it was, I'm sure
there was other people, I'm sure too, but it was just a little basic program that read the binary
file in, in by bit by bit or a byte by byte effectively. And then, and converted it into,
uh, regular ASCII, uh, low ASCII characters and then, uh, put a checksum on the end of the line
or account on the other line of the binary equivalent of it. And it allowed us to take and,
and transmit a file in, in blocks of data. And then on the other end, run the program and it
would put it back in as the binary file because people were trying to download binary files. And
as soon as it would run into a, uh, you know, an, an, an EOF indicator, it would close the file,
you know, or a clear screen. You'd get this garbage come across the screen that you couldn't
interpret even. And it would, uh, it would keep clearing your screen and, and that sort of stuff
because ASCII 12s. And so what it amounts to is it, uh, uh, X modem, uh, was a protocol that was
incorporated in the RBBS, which allowed the transfer of, uh, binary files. And of course,
Chuck Forsberg wrote Z modem later on, but, uh, the X modem module. And of course that was only
128 characters at a time it could send. And, uh, I think Forsberg put out the protocol for Y modem
because I think he developed a Y modem, but his protocol required, uh, nobody could figure out
how to implement Y modem was one K blocks, which was a lot faster. And the things, this is all this
overhead on, on, uh, sending 120 by blocks was difficult. Uh, it took a lot of time and that
some of the, uh, long distance rates where people were running big phone bills, cause they didn't
realize how much time their kids were spending on, on the, uh, on the internet or on the, uh,
bulletin boards, calling it bulletin boards. So what I did was, uh, I took the thing and, and
looked at his specifications and the biggest stumbling block was the header for a Y modem
block so that you could, cause theoretically you could go back and you could send two or three
blocks, miss a block, and then go back and get that one block cause the blocks were numbered
incremental. And so, uh, the block had to be, the header had to be perfect, which was interesting
because it had the time and the date of the, along with the file name in the, in the header
information and the date and time was a 32, uh, not 32 byte, it was a 16 bit, uh, field of the date
and time of the file creation in octal of the number of seconds past January the 1st, 1980.
That's, uh, he was weird. There was no doubt about that, you know? So anyway, I had to sit and figure
out a way to compute the, uh, to be able to bring the file time and date across was to be able to
compute the octal equivalency of the number of seconds, uh, past January 1st, 1980, that the
file date was created. So anyway, we finally got Y modem incorporated into, uh, RBBSPC
and that was a big improvement of course then. And of course that was all blown aside when,
when Chuck came out with his Z motor protocol because it was so much cleaner and, and, uh,
more robust and a lot more reliable, completely reliable. But anyway, I started with just a PC
and two floppy drives and then I really graduated. I had, I was able to come up with a, they had to
made a, uh, an expansion, uh, be able to put four floppy drives on the same machine and that was a
big thing. And then we went to big improvement to double-sided floppy disks because they were 320,
uh, K on a side, I mean on a disk. And then of course they, what they call the, the, uh,
they improved it. I think DOS, uh, 2.0, I think it came up to 360 K on a flop, on a five and a
quarter floppy, you know? And then, then the, the bombshell dropped with the IBM expansion chassis
with a 10 megabyte hard risk and it only cost $3,000, you know? So, uh, guess who had one,
you know? And, uh, but before that time there were people using hard disk. They didn't call
them hard disk. They call them Winchesters, you know, cause that was the technology, uh, for the
hard disk. So it was kind of interesting. It was a really exciting time and things is at first,
you know, the, I, I knew I had to order a special phone line cause I couldn't use my house phone for
running a bullet board, which some people tried to do. They'd put their phone number out and they
say only call during the hours between five and seven at night or something like this, you know?
And they'd get calls at all times during the day and there would be nobody on the other end of the
line. And so, uh, and what it was, was a modem calling and of course they couldn't, when a modem
calls you, unless you hit the tone, it's going to sit there and wait for you. Am I rambling too
much? No. Okay. No, this is exactly the stuff that I ask people about. Oh, I mean. Yeah. So either way, uh,
the moving along there, you know, uh, got this 10 megabyte hard drive and it was just, the number
was just propagated among the users in the user group and the local people. Uh, at that time,
I think, I don't think there was any other bulletin boards running on an IBM PC in the whole region
here, you know? And I think about the, if there were some, uh, running on IBM, I mean, it was pretty
short timeframe from November of 81 till I think about July when I ran full force, uh, on an IBM
PC. So there were, if there were people running a bulletin board, there weren't too many. Okay.
And I know that Gene Plants in Chicago and myself, uh, were among the first anyway. Uh, and that's
when the magazines, the rags started, uh, finding out about these bulletin boards. And of course,
there were some bulletin boards that were, uh, I don't think there was as much interest in pirated
software that day because it wasn't much software available at all period, you know? I mean, any
pirating that was done was, uh, you know, you had to copy the floppies, you know? And then of course,
there was a, the copy protection routines that Lotus and, and a few of the other people put in
there, you know, that people were, uh, there were, there was bulletin boards that specialized in,
in ways to get around that copy protection, you know? Which is a, uh, a whole other matter.
Our user group was instrumental in trying to get Lotus to stop, uh, copy protection primarily
because it was interfering more with legal use of it than it was in illegal use. And of course,
a lot of the people who copy software and use it, uh, they, they probably wouldn't have bought it
in the first place. So they're, they're not necessarily losing a customer. In some cases,
uh, I'm sure that people do that, you know, like, you know, it's quite well known that the majority
or not majority, an awful lot of people who are pirating software today are people who can easily
afford it, to buy it if they wanted to. Lawyers and accountants, you know, I have, I do a little bit of
consulting on the side, uh, because I enjoy it and because it keeps me going and, and, uh, allows me
to buy my toys, you know? But, uh, as, as has always been the case, you know, that's what I do. These
other things for us to be able to afford the toys. And so, uh, they, they, they, uh, they don't think
nothing about, uh, you know, here's lawyers, you know, that, uh, have, that make, you know, 275 an
hour or something else like this. And, and they're worried about, uh, you know, why, why can't I put
that, that copy of, uh, Microsoft Office 2000 on more than one computer? I only bought one copy and
it's, you know, it's just sitting there. Why can't I use it? You know, so they do it. And, uh, but anyway,
I never, that's one thing on my bullet, but anyway, so it started getting nationwide attention, I
think at that time, because they, there was two or three books written in the middle 80s, 82, 83
timeframe. And they had my old infamous 301-949-8848 number in it. And, you know, I wouldn't want that
number today because there's probably people reading that book, found it in a junk shop
someplace and decide to try that number because I'm sure that, uh, the people who get that number,
but anyway, I had 8848 and 8849, I think. And, uh, cause the 8849 was, was one that the, uh,
local user group people use more than 8848, but 8848 was busy for about a four year period of time
in the 80s, middle 80s to late 80s. Uh, I think one time I took, uh, uh, some logs and I looked
at it and there was something like a maximum of 15 seconds between calls, 24 hours a day. It was
one of those things where in order to do any maintenance, in some cases I had to actually,
uh, just drop the person offline because they were either somebody, cause there was, there were abusers,
you know, who would get on and, and you could tell who they were by, you could see the logs,
you know, you see the people, they'd log on and get a program. And the next one in that chain,
somebody else would log on with a different name and, and another one. Well, when caller ID came
out at one time and I had a little electronic interface to caller ID. And, uh, if, if the
caller ID told me, it would show that on the screen, it wouldn't tell them anything. They
didn't know that I was doing this, but I'd see this caller, I had one of those little, uh, boxes
and it would break out the caller ID with just a telephone number is all it was at that time. It
wasn't an advanced caller ID. And I put that on the screen to what number they were calling from.
And then alongside of it was the number that they said they were from, you know, and sometimes they
weren't the same. And, uh, so I would, uh, be able to, to restrict their access that way. But I tried
to be as reasonable. I, I gave everybody an hour access at first because, uh, it was one of those
things you had to, because some of those programs, you in buying or in, you know, in ASCII trying to
download a program. I told them, well, I wrote the, uh, the, I started out writing the, the file
transfer modules for this HostCom program, which was a commercial program that Don sold. And then
him and I got into it over something. It wasn't, uh, it wasn't major. He, I, I, I don't remember
exactly what it was, but in a way we got into it. I said, well, hell with that. Yeah. I wrote all
the file transfer modules and the message modules and that sort of stuff. And I wrote an ordering
module for it and all that sort of stuff. And I wrote it all in it, uh, compiled basic. But I
said, well, why not just write the front end? So I wrote the front end myself and I called it PC
Host. And I sold several hundred copies. What the neatest thing about the PC Host was that I sold
a lot of copies to, uh, businesses because it had the option of programming the motive
that it just picked up the phone. It didn't answer with a tone because the war dialers were
going around dialing all these numbers, looking for BBS, as you know, or looking for entry into
places. And if it didn't receive a tone, they just hang up. Okay. But this right here, you had to
send it a tone. It was a reverse, uh, uh, type thing. So I set the, I set my system. You had
the option of, of saying, uh, reverse tone, you know? And so what it is, is the thing would pick
up the phone, but of course you couldn't hear any static or anything like that. Like people answering
the phone. And then on the other end, you had to hit, hit reverse and you send a me a tone. Then
we'd talk to one another and everything would be fine. And you could log in. Well, what it is,
is the, the Highlife Fountains in, uh, Florida, they bought 30 copies and they used them for
transferring, uh, transmitting their financial data back and forth at night because they were
worried about the kids trying to get into their system. So they use this as a front end. And,
and all it was, was just a, a log in and transfer the file. It was their financial data and they
didn't have to worry about anybody finding the phone because the phone didn't send out a tone
when it answered, you know, like nowadays you call up and get a fax machine, you get this, you know,
while you didn't get anything, uh, off this routine. It was something unique that other people didn't
do. And so I, I made a little money off. I didn't make a hell lot of money off it. I didn't do it
for the money. I did it because I could do it, you know, and I enjoyed it. And that was the bottom
line with running the bulletin board. I didn't make any money off. I never charged anybody anything.
And, uh, I tried to have as many programs as I could. Uh, I never had any cracking things or,
or that sort of stuff. I had fixes for every program. Of course, the only place that, uh,
uh, you could get some of these little, uh, fixes for your programs was user groups.
And we had a software library. The, uh, so in my mind, the name of my bulletin board was the
capital PC software library. And people called it from all over the world. I had people from,
uh, Europe, Japan, other places on the system at different times, but mostly people from the
U S of course, and some of the people, you know, from all over the United States would call.
Of course, the people in the West coast would like it because, you know, when it was late in the
evening there, it was early in the morning here and people weren't up. But I know people who said
they used to get up at two o'clock in the morning to try to get on the system and they just have to
sit it on redial to try to get through. And that was a nice thing about things like PC talk and
procom and Q modem, you know, but, uh, I tried to keep it as simple as possible,
as simple as interface as possible, smallest amount of information on the screen as possible.
Not like, uh, you know, one of the problems, like I knew John Friel who wrote Q modem and I tried to
talk to John one time. I had a, I went to, uh, uh, out in Las Vegas during Comdex time, the, uh,
in fact, the Mustang software people, uh, uh, before John actually joined them, uh, I met, uh,
John out there and half a dozen other people. But, uh, I told him, you know, I said, one of the,
one of the problems I found with shareware is that sometimes the authors in their desire to please
and their desire to, to please as many people as they can, they ended up junking up their software
so much. It had so many options in there that it got too complicated for most people to use
either that, or it got too complicated from the point of view is that it interfered with
the actual operation of it because there was so many bills and whistles, you know?
I mean, there's only so many things. It was just like, you know, Q modem was a great program,
but it, it also had these little crazy icon things you could do. If you logged onto certain
bulletin boards, you'd get these little icons like, you know, pre windows days type thing,
you know? And it was, it was, uh, to me, uh, you know, it was more of, it wasn't a utility anymore
communication program. It was a, an application, a communication program, which, uh, the difference
I found is, was the number of bills and whistles. In other words, if, if all you want to do is you
want to call up your read and capture a message board and read and write messages, uh, and transfer
files back and forth, that's four basic things. Okay. But if you want it to play music to you,
whenever you go to this certain page or, or, uh, you know, some of the bulletin boards actually,
when you logged onto them, they, they sent this big graphic to you of some kind, or, uh, in,
in those cases, it was, it was text graphics. It wasn't real graphics as we know them today,
but, uh, it was kind of, uh, an exciting time, you know, and really that's, uh,
I tried to have all the, uh, files on my bulletin board that were on the software library for the
Capital PZ user group. We started off and, and, uh, we had a disc of the month, you know, the latest
fixes for things or, or maybe a spreadsheet for a multi-plan or, or VisiCalc or one of them, you
know, that, uh, we put on this and they, at those days they were small and you gotta remember the
DOS 1.0 came on 160K floppy and there was still, uh, I think about, uh, 60K left on the disc after
all the DOS because command.com was only 2,400 bytes. Uh, the first version, you know, and in
fact I have, I have, uh, almost every version of DOS on the original disc yet, but, uh, so no, we
had all that right there and we used to sell them at the user group meetings. When we'd have meetings,
we'd have, you know, uh, through 400 people, 500 people show up and we'd sell four or five thousand
dollars worth of discs at five dollars a pick, but it was a contribution more than anything else to
the user group to build up our treasury so that they could, they could pay for the projectors for
the meetings and that sort of stuff, you know. So, but it was a, it was a pretty good-sized business.
Then I can't remember the organization that was out in California tried to capitalize on software.
I keep thinking of PCCig or something like this, you know. Oh, you're thinking of Walnut Creek?
Yeah, and them, and there was somebody else too. Uh, they had a disc of the month thing. You paid
ten dollars a month and you got this disc every month and that sort of stuff. I'm trying to think
of... Yeah, there's a number of them that are out there that I, I mean, I've gotten copies of their
CDs, things like that that were... This was the days before CDs. These were floppies in those days,
you know. But there was, this was back in the late 80s, uh, and I can't remember who it was. They,
but they had, they had, they had a big fight with some of the shareware authors because the shareware
authors didn't like their work being listed on it. They wanted them listed on there, but they,
these people were making money at it and it was, it was a pretty good-sized business at the time.
I don't, I don't, of course it's not there anymore, I don't think, but I remember that some of the
shareware authors were a little bit, uh, pissed off because the, uh, there were people making money
off there and they weren't getting anything, you know. Because an awful lot of people use shareware
and never did anything. They never sent anything, you know. I probably sent, uh, you know, it's just
like Andrew Flugelmann, you know. He had PC Talk and, and the things, this is it, it was interpreted
at first and I helped write the x-modem module or bring, uh, Ward's protocol and using the specs,
bring it into PC Talk so it could be able to do the x-modem and I wrote the y-modem so it would
be able to receive and send to y-modem also. And I, you know, I, in fact, I got PC Talk, uh, you know,
playing PC Talk before the one, two, and three from, I think it, I think it was, uh, from Gene
Plants' bullet board in Chicago is where I downloaded and Larry Jordan, uh, who wrote a, a program
and there was, I'm trying to think of, uh, there was somebody else's name, you know, this, this is
20-some years ago, you know. It's hard to remember some of the names of the people but anyway there
was a couple other communication programs and, uh, just memory just goes, you know, I've been
racking my brain here the last few days trying to remember some of the things that, so when we did
get a conversation we could talk about it, you know. Well a lot of, you know, a lot of it with
the names, that's kind of the kind of stuff that I can always pull up and have and I've been working
with, uh, you know, having lots of support materials on my, on my, uh, on my site so that people can
look that up but the stuff that I also would like to know is, for instance, I mean, when you first
put up your bulletin board system, um, just from the description you've put it, that's about the
price of a nice family car for that system and yet you're, you've taken it, right, and by doing this
you've made it unusable to yourself. It's no longer usable. You can't even desk view it. I mean, the
thing is, that's it, you're done. It's like, it's like buying a car and putting it outside with the
keys in the ignition and saying, you know, have a great ride, bring it back, try to fill up the gas
when you bring it back and half the time you have to fill the gas. Why did we do it, okay? You know,
I guess what it amounts to is this, is that, uh, most of the people did it, uh,
to help other people, you know. You know, when I say this, is that there wasn't any monetary return,
that's for sure, but the things, this is in the long run, you know, you know, every time you give,
you always get something back and in the long run, uh, I got a lot of things back. Uh, you know,
Microsoft used to send me free goodies, you know, and other people sent me free goodies. I started
writing about my experiences. I become to be, uh, be known as a quote expert in the user group,
you know, help, uh, I was on what they call the helpline and people would call me up and, and, uh,
you know, several times, you know, and of course this was all free. I never charged anybody for
anything. Several times I'd get a check in a mail from somebody say, you really saved my bananas
that time. And I just want to let you know how much I appreciate it. And they'd send a check,
you know, sometimes it'd be a hundred dollars, you know, at that time, you know, that was,
you know, I was amazed that people would do that. Then I started thinking, well,
you know, I see some of these consultants who claim to be consultants and all they do is they,
they charge you to tell you the time and they borrow your watch to do it with, you know.
Mm-hmm. So, uh, I said, you know, uh, I enjoyed it, you know, I actually enjoyed it and I was,
you know, there's the difference. If I was in a situation where I couldn't afford to do it,
then of course, you know, that, that would be a, uh, overriding, uh, problem if you can't afford
to do it, but I could afford to do it. Uh, and so I did it and I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed helping
people cause you get a lot of personal satisfaction out of people just saying thanks, you know, that
we really appreciate that. And, uh, I felt like an obligation to pay something back, so to speak,
for the help other people had given me. And so, uh, why I did it, uh, you know, I think you're
probably going to find a different answer for everybody, but it boils down to, they just enjoy
helping people, you know. Uh, I'd say that's, that's about it. I just enjoyed helping. Like you say,
about five or $6,000 worth of stuff. And at that time, which was a lot of money, uh,
it, it kind of launched me and gave me a little more self-confidence in the computer area
because I've had no training at all in computers. I taught myself everything I know, uh, and I ended
up to be the, uh, systems analyst on a IBM mainframe and in charge of, uh, 200, uh,
uh, microcomputers, uh, for a fairly good, a good size company. And I had quite a few people
working with me and for me, uh, and it gave me a lot of confidence in the computer area that
I finally figured it out, you know, that back in the pre-80s days, you know, the mainframe
programmers all said, you know, what do you want to do? Well, we'll give you something. We'll think
it'll let you, we'll let you do what you want to do. But if you don't like it, you have to come back
and pay us again and we'll do it again, you know? And the things is they tried to make computers so
mysterious that the average person, and then, then they got to the point where allowing people to,
to do dial-in and, and what they call Wilbur, you know, which was a programming, uh,
interface language, dial-up interface language, do a IBM mainframe to be able to, uh,
uh, create data and list many programs. And so, uh, uh, you know, I said, you know, this programming
is not all it's cut out to be. It's not as mysterious or, or, uh, black art as they say it is.
And so I was able to write programs of my own and, uh, it, it gave me the, uh, feeling that,
you know, here was something that I have all myself, if I mess it up, I screw it up, uh,
there's just me and I can fix it. And I learned more from my mistakes than I ever learned from
my successes. And I wrote programs to do things that, uh, I wanted to get done, you know? And it
worked. And, but anyway, as far as, you know, it's just like Andrew was a writer, I think,
and he was also, of course, the original editor of, uh, PC Magazine, you know, before
Ziff Davis bought it and then they went and formed PC World. And, uh, Larry, I mentioned,
and I'm trying to think of a couple of other people who, who I knew and met at different
times. But anyway, uh, uh, Sam Whitmore was, uh, uh, somebody I knew when he was at, at, uh,
PC Week. And, uh, in fact, I had, I think with DOS, and I'm trying to think of what, what version
DOS, the first recognition of hard disk, I think it was 3.0 or something like this or
2.1, something like this. But anyway, when it first, hard disks first were recognized by, uh,
DOS and, uh, I got a, uh, I was on the beta team for Microsoft. And so they asked me if they could
come down and take a pre-look at it, you know, and we, we went through it with a binary editor
looking at, uh, you know, Norton at that time was great for looking at, uh, uh, Peter Norton had
some great utilities for looking at files back in those days. And so I was able to, we were able to
look at it and find out some of the options that were available, uh, in things like check disk and
disk copy and Dell tree and all that sort of stuff that, that people didn't know were there.
And there was, in fact, there's still a lot of things that work quite well, uh, under, you know,
uh, Windows 2003 server and Windows XP. A lot of people, I use batch files all the time to do
different things and people, you know, batch files, DOS, what's that? You know, I mean, it's just like,
I don't know if you've ever seen anybody try to do a, uh, a directory in DOS and they, either that
or they type dir slash w, you know, and, uh, and then they wonder how come things don't show up the
way they'd like to have them look like, you know? And they, and you, it's just like, you know, there's,
there's programs right now that you can take in, in Windows XP or, or 95 and up, that if you just
take and touch on a directory and hit right click, you can put it into a, an Excel spreadsheet and
it will, it'll give you a complete directory listing right into an Excel spreadsheet. But if you do
that on your root directory of your C drive, I mean, you could end up with a hundred thousand files
and that's a pretty good size spreadsheet in anybody's book, you know? Now, um, uh,
certainly while some of the BBS software, uh, asks for donations in return for running it and stuff,
PC board goes into it as a commercial venture in around 85, 86, and then by, you know, 89, 90,
suddenly there's a BBS industry, there's Mustang, there's Galacticom, there's, um, Sync, well,
that's what Syncronet comes a little later, but, you know, as somebody who was there when they were
all first, you know, generally traded public domain programs being moved around, do you remember
having any kind of reaction to these board, this board software coming up for sale?
Well, no, I really didn't. And the reason why is because, you know, uh, I knew it, let's put this
way. I, in fact, I told it all, everyone I could tell at the time, I says people who developed a
piece of software without first going out on the net or out on the bulletin boards and finding out
what was available in the same area, you know, there were people reinventing the wheel, you know,
and I always thought that was kind of stupid. Somebody, somebody come up with, like somebody
come up to me immediately and say, well, you know, I wrote this program to do this, you know,
and I says, well, you know, I hate to tell you this, but Verne Berg wrote list, and I says,
you can see anything you want, you know, uh, yeah, in a file, it wouldn't make it as binary or ASCII
or whatever it is, it'll do E, E, Ipsy Dick translation for you, you know. They say, yeah,
I said, yeah, it's been on bullet boards for a long time. I says, uh, you know, there's people to
write compression algorithms and do it for you. You know, I says, if you don't go out and go on
the bulletin boards. And so I, I said, then natural thing, I says, communications is, is the, is the
bottom line to improving everyone's computer skills. And so therefore that somebody would
come up with a PC board, uh, as a commercial product, uh, Fred Clark and them, I says, you know,
more power to them. I didn't bother me at all. You know, I wasn't forced to use it. Uh, and of
course, at that time I was actually, uh, uh, I wasn't marketing it, you know, but, uh, my PC host
program, you know, I sold, but I only wanted to set up the business. I, I told people they called
up, so I want to run PC, PC host. And I says, no, you don't. I says, uh, you know, it was only $35.
I think at the time wasn't a nuisance charge or anything else. But the thing is that, uh, uh,
I says, you know, I really don't want to do it. It's primary for business. And that's what I
marketed it for. And, or it was marketed by somebody else. But, uh, I didn't have any problems
with that. The only, the only problem I have that I still to this day, you know, you know, I got
involved in the, in the, uh, the area of possible, uh, lifting of source code to put in the commercial
program. Well, you know, uh, I look at this way, the, there is no law that says you can't take a
public domain program and compile it and sell it, you know, as your own. I mean, if people believe
you, you know, I mean, let the buyer be aware, you know, if they, if they're dumb enough to
pay for a program they could have gotten for free, then, uh, you know, there's one born every minute,
as some infamous guy said. And the thing is this is that there was a lot of talk that the, that's
what the PC board did originally was just compile and make a few small changes and sell it as PC
board, change the front end effectively a little bit, you know? And, but then I saw Ken Goosins
actually showed me logging onto a PC board system and to an RBBS system that if you did a certain
thing, you got this error code on the screen in both cases. So that tells me that there was,
there was some modules in there that were lifted and the errors were, were from RBBS to PC board.
And I saw that over Ken's house one day and, and I said, well, it looks to me like that's what they
did, you know? I mean, he, it was, it was kind of like the smoking gun, you know? Uh, it, it didn't
really make any difference to me as far as, uh, uh, have, hold anything against Fred Clark and
of course, they went belly up finally anyway, cause you know, the internet has wiped out a lot
of people, you know? People are not going to call on a long distance on a telephone when they can
call a local number and do the same thing, you know? Right. Clark development went under 96.
Yeah. Yeah. Mustang got bought out. Galacticom got bought out. Um, and, uh, what's the Jim
Farrer, what is the name for, uh, Mustang? Yeah. Herrera, Herrera. Yeah. Jim Herrera. I interviewed,
I did not get a chance to interview him cause he's still a CEO somewhere. Um, but the, uh,
I interviewed a few employees of Mustang who were very gung-ho. I went out to Bakersfield,
California and interviewed them and they were, they had the greatest time. They think of it as
the greatest time because, uh, you know, there were 50 or 60 employees at that company for years.
Did you ever talk John for you? Um, I missed out. I was going to go through Iowa and then I ended
up not going through Iowa. Um, he and I talked a long time ago, but no, I didn't end up talking
to John. Um, yeah, I, well, a lot of these people got on my bulletin board, you know, uh, John
Field was on my bulletin board. Dan Plunk was on my bulletin board, you know. Uh, uh, uh, in other
cases, uh, I don't know who they were a lot of times because, you know, when you logged on,
you could put any name you wanted there because I didn't verify information. Uh, I wasn't out to,
to make a buck or anything. So it didn't, uh, consist of, uh, of verifying who they actually
were. I just took everybody at face value. And I always felt that, you know, if you get too hung
up, it's just like people, I didn't have a big message board. Uh, I, uh, our user group had a,
a message board, which was West merchants. And then we finally moved it, uh, to our offices.
And, and at NIH, we had a computer running RBBS and had a big message board and that people would
get into pissing contest with one another, you know? And, you know, I always, I always, just like
on my bulletin board, if somebody would leave a nasty note about why I didn't have the,
the latest version of so-and-so ready for download or something else like this, you know, I just
ignored them. I just put them as I call it, you know, a Twitter filter, except I just just,
I just ignored them. I didn't respond to them. And I found out that, you know, 95% of the people who
were idiots, uh, if you don't respond to them, they'll go away. Uh, there's always a small group
of people that you have to take some kind of action. And the best thing to do is, is, is not
fight with them, just pull the plug on them. And it works every time because there's always somebody
else who's more interested in getting in, who will come right in as soon as that, as soon as
that system resets, it'll come right back up again. It'll be somebody else. It won't be them now.
And they can sit there and fume all they want to about one, get back and leave you a nasty gram,
you know, comments to the sys op, you know, well, I think you're a, a, an asshole or whatever the
case may be. And I say, yo, goodbye, Charlie. And that little switch on the, on the telephone light
works great. Just cuts them off and their motor drops out. And mine does too and resets the system,
you know, and you get these people who'd, who'd, who'd call up and then try to, to, uh, you know,
be another person. And you could tell by what they were doing. Uh, you know, you watch people
as they go through and put the, uh, items in the menu, you know, and then go to files and they go to this
selection and they select this and for down, that sort of stuff, you know, darn well, it's just on
under another name, you know? So click and, and this way here, you didn't get in a contest. You
didn't have to justify anything. There was no way they could prove that you did it, you know? Uh,
and I, I just had some little switches on my telephone lines and I'd just switch it on the
other direction. It would drop the telephone line, the system would reset, you know, and,
and their system would reset and it worked, you know? Um, so,
well, I guess I asked that in a different form, but I mean, I was interested in, you know, certainly
by 91, 92 with the assistance of Boardwatch and, and One Corporation, which is owned by Phil Becker
and Jack Rickard, you know, this BBS industry, you know, with like everything, the conventions,
the, you know, the, the associations and all of the other stuff. There sure were professionals in
the BBS, SysOps and that sort of stuff. I went to several of their meetings and that sort of stuff
and, uh, um, I'm thinking of this guy's name, John, uh, I can't think of his name. There was
somebody, John King, I think his name was, did that name ring a bell with you? No, but I mean,
I was thinking, you just made me think of Dan McClure. Dan McClure. Yeah. Okay. SysOps
Association guy. Yeah. SysOps Association guy. You know, some of the people were in it because
there was money involved, you know, and anytime there's money involved, there's going to be people
involved who were in it for the money. And the thing is, this is it, you know, not that that's
wrong after all, you know, we're, we're a profit motive, motivated country, you know, and people
are, you know, there was people who run bulletin boards and make good money at it. They charge
a subscription fee every month, you know, and if you didn't pay, you didn't get it. And they actually,
uh, uh, had, uh, you know, took Visa and MasterCard and all that sort of stuff, which was great,
you know, uh, for them. I mean, I didn't, I didn't feel, you know, a lot of SysOps got this
protective feeling about their users, you know, like they were my users, you were over here trying
to steal my users, you know, well, first things, this is it, you know, there isn't no such thing
as my users, you know, they're fickle, they go where the, where they get the most for their bang
for their buck or, or time or whatever, you know, and for people to, to, that, and I, I talked to
SysOps and we had a, a capillary SysOps association right here and you could get some of the people and
they were talking about my users, you know, my users, like as if, oh, what's that guy doing over
on your bulletin board? He's supposed to be on mine, you know, and I thought to myself, you know,
you know, what kind of a crazy mind thinks of my users, you know, you know, they're, they're not,
kind of like my flock, it's like a preacher and people in his church start going to other churches
and, and he's all mad at them, you know, he doesn't keep his basic concept of providing a service
and I think this is, I always felt that, you know, the more software that I could get out to people
and would help them with, do their job, you know, or enjoy their computer, whatever the case may be,
you know, and the things this is, I used to preach and say, you know, if you don't get on bulletin
boards and find out what's out there and get information from other people, I mean, your
computer is worthless because you don't know of the, of the other capabilities that this thing has,
you know, and, you know, your computer has a lot of capabilities, but the things is, you know,
what you get from the factory is, is only part of it, it's what you make improvements to it and add
things to it that makes a big difference too and the things is, I'd see people, you know, doing
things the hard way, you know, it's nothing more frustrating than sitting there watching someone
trying to, to bring up an editor to create a, or add to a config.sys file when, you know, copy con
works so easily, you know, and you just copy con, name of the file and put the line in F6, hit return
and then you can just rename the autoexec to something else and then copy autoexec or that
file name plus this one you created to autoexec.bat and you've now added a line to your autoexec.bat
file without an editor if you want to, you know, and it's, it's easy to do from the DOS command line
and I'm still a DOS command line person, I still, you say a lot of it, I love it. Is there anything
else as we're getting to the end of this tape that, you know, you think people today really missed
out with, with bulletin boards? I don't think enough people used bulletin boards and I think
some of the bulletin boards ended up to be sounding boards for people's political, religious or
whatever agenda rather than a method of sharing information. If someone would come up with a good
subject to discuss and improvements for some software or whatever or to make your computer
work faster or whatever the case may be, there would be many times there would somebody sit there
and spend all their time shooting them down, you know, or saying, you know, you're an idiot,
whatever the case may be, you know, and so it's, I'd say if nothing else, it was an enjoyable time.
I enjoyed it very much. The biggest reason why I stopped running a bulletin board is because the
internet started, you know, and the thing is this is it, I recognized that the internet was going to
wipe out bulletin boards because the biggest thing was cost. In other words, people were not going to
run a, not going to dial into a bulletin board across the country when they can have information
at their fingertips through the internet, even though it was dial-up local, but it was dial-up
local, you know, and of course AOL was the, was one of the driving factors in getting people to
to do something, you know. I mean, there's AOL people and I always recommend AOL for people who
have absolutely no understanding of computers or what it does because they can get in less trouble
on AOL than anything else. Dialing up to an ISP or using even a cable to go in to retrieve their
email, they know, got to have a lot of things they got to know, whereas with AOL, you know,
it's pretty a no-brainer for a lot of people and then of course the techies, you know, they think
they're always smarter than everybody else and AOL is for dummies. Well, that's not true, you know.
AOL is for an awful lot of people who use it. I have one client who's an international lawyer
or a trade lawyer and he uses AOL because, you know, he gets paid big bucks. He's not
worried about how to configure an SMTP server name on his email program when all he has to do is
AOL anywhere in the world. He goes to Vietnam, he goes to Russia and that sort of stuff. There's
always a local number or some number he can call and he can get his email and he can send email
and that's worth ten thousand dollars a year to him at least in communications and the thing is
that no techie is going to tell me that it would be easier for him to use something else, you know.
Another email program. Like I use Eudora. I've used Eudora since day one for once I first got
on the internet. I think it was Eudora 2.0 or something like this I first found and now I use
6, you know, and, you know, you've got a new spam filter. Of course, yeah, I get probably 150
spams a day but, you know, it's just easy. You know, the filter catches most of them but the
rest, you know, you can tell by the subject, you know, the old delete key works great, you know.